What Causes Earthquakes

Yue, Z.Q. 2008a. What caused the catastrophic landslides during the May 12 Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan, China. Oral presentation at UK-China Geonet UK-China Geonet Workshopsm Hm o, September 10-12, 2008, Ningbo, China. 

We set up activities for primary and secondary schools students, addressing three basic issues (1) what cause the Earth to have earthquakes and volcanoes (2) how earthquakes and volcanoes work, and (3) why these natural phenomena are not predictable. Each issue is tuned to specific learning processes—emotional or cognitive— capable to trigger proper behavior towards hazards. Activities highlight in a simple way just a few basic aspects of the phenomena so that the audience might independently repeat experiments. 

What Cause the Earth to Have Earthquakes and Volcanoes ... 

In what follows the above considerations are applied to the failure of the supports of a tank. The overturning couple caused by the earthquake tries to overturn the tank. It gives the force exerted on the pedestal bolts... 

Locate one or more articles on a significant earthquake event and identify the causes of failure for structures that resulted. Identify what changes in designs resulted from a study of the effects or could reduce the degree of damage in one or more of the damaged structures. 

What motions from an earthquake potentially cause buildings and other structures to fail ... 

None can predict exactly when, where, what, and how big a disaster would happen. Based on EM-DAT data, there were 6669 disasters, 1,149,920 deaths, and 2167 million affected people, and causing about US 1572 billion of disaster costs between 2003 and 2012 (IFRC 2013). Three deathless disaster of decade were the 2004 Indian Tsunami (226,408 deaths), the 2010 earthquake in Haiti (222,570 deaths), and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008 (138,375 deaths). 

In this chapter we shall first examine what are the socio-economic consequences of earthquake and then discuss briefly how socio-economic consequences are recorded and the difficulties in collecting and highlight the discrepancies in these data. This will be followed by a review of recent efforts to standardize the definitions of social and economic parameters. The causes and the contributing factors to differences in socioeconomic consequences are also explored in section Characteristics of Socio-economic Consequences. An assessment of the socio-economic... 

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